Samsung Partners With Panasonic To License HDR10+
Samsung, Panasonic and 20th Century Fox have announced a new partnership to begin licensing the open and royalty-free HDR10+ standard to other manufacturers.
The three companies will establish a licensing entity that will begin licensing HDR10+ to TV, Blu-ray player and set-top box manufacturers, as well as content companies and SoC vendors, starting from January 2018.
“As leaders in home entertainment content and hardware, the three companies are ideal partners for bringing HDR10+ into the homes of consumers everywhere,” said Samsung Electronics’ Senior Vice President of the Visual Display Business Jongsuk Chu.
HDR10+ will cost manufacturers “only a nominal administrative fee” according to Samsung, compared to the royalty payments required for the competing HDR technology Dolby Vision.
Samsung and Amazon announced the HDR10+ format earlier this year, which built upon the benefits of the HDR format by adding dynamic metadata. Samsung said this delivers “unprecedented picture quality on all displays with brightness, color, and contrast automatically optimized for each scene”.
Dolby Vision similarly uses dynamic metadata to send scene-by-scene and frame-by-frame adjustments to a HDR-supported TV.
Additional features of Dolby Vision see it edge ahead in terms of future proofing, including a maximum 10,000 nit brightness and support for 12-bit colour compared to 10-bit colour for HDR10+, but Samsung said that HDR10+ is “designed to allow for future development and innovation”.
“By offering considerable HDR picture quality improvements across a wider range of TVs while accelerating the amount of premium HDR content available, we expect HDR10+ to quickly become the defacto HDR format,” said Panasonic Executive Officer Yuki Kusumi.
Samsung and Panasonic will be providing more information about HDR10+ technology at IFA 2017, while additional details about the HDR10+ license program will be announced at CES 2018.